Marmoreal It’s Otto Wagner’s 173rd birthday: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wagner#mediaviewer/File:Otto_Wagner_photo2_retouched.jpg When I first went to Vienna, in the summer of 1958, I didn’t notice much about the buildings. The first drive by taxi from the Westbahnhof to the Döblinger Hauptstraße was mainly taken up with being sick after a day on the boat and the train. In the next few days, before we went off to Gloggnitz, I took in a superficial impression of baroque churches and Habsburg-yellow façades. It was only slowly, on subsequent visits, in 1959, 1962, 1964, 1968 and again and again after, that I started to distinguish the elements of Jugendstil. Leavis said of CP Snow: ‘He is as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be.’ I’m the equivalent in the realm of looking and seeing. But even I noticed this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsplatz_Stadtbahn_Station#mediaviewer/File:Otto-Wagner-Pavillon_Wien.jpg And I think I even sort-of noticed how, in Friedrich Achleitner’s words, ‘Wagner reached a highpoint of his dialectic…between function and poetry’. The last time we were there, I finally noticed these: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wagner#mediaviewer/File:Majolica_House_facade_-_balconies.jpg
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 05:57:44 +0000